We talked for a while about relationships between animals in captivity—between animal and animal as well as between animal and man. Doris Ready told me that she had raised at her home a kit fox, one of the little animals that live in the western deserts. The fox, a female, has lived in the house ever since she was very small, and has made one or two strange friendships in the process, the most familiar one being with the Ready cat.
“An ordinary house cat?” I asked.
“Yes, just a cat. When the fox was only a few weeks old and the cat was about a year and a half, they met for the first time. I wasn’t at all sure of the cat’s reaction, so I held on to him while the fox investigated, and then I held the fox so the cat could relax, and after a while it seemed safe to let them both go. For a while—I forget how long, exactly—nothing happened, but one day when they were both out in the yard, all of a sudden the fox began doing her thing behind a bush—dodging and posturing, ears laid back, making a kind of giggling sound. Then the cat jumped into the air and started playing like a kitten, chasing the fox, and that was just what the fox wanted. They played around like that all over the place. Sometimes they chased each other in the house, fox after cat. Then the fox finally began the grooming thing, starting to nibble, nibble, nibble on the cat, and the cat didn’t care for it at all. He kept backing away.”
Hanson explained to me, “Kit foxes’ teeth are admirably constructed for grooming. The muzzle is quite long, and at the tip are the small front teeth they use in the exercise. They love to groom each other.”
Mrs. Ready took up her story. “Well, the fox kept doing it, and then one day—I don’t remember just when it was—the cat started grooming the fox back. Nowadays when the cat doesn’t feel like it he just walks off. Other times, they groom each other for as much as ten or fifteen minutes. Sometimes you have a wet fox and a wet cat. They take turns: after the fox has groomed for a while, she seems to feel it’s her turn, and she stands there sort of leaning toward the cat with her eyes half closed.”
“The only time the cat objects is when the fox starts grooming his ears,” Hanson said. “But she can’t be stopped. It’s an important part of the kit fox’s social behavior. I told Michael Fox about it. You know who he is, don’t you? The man who studies canine-and-cat behavior. Well, I told him about this unusual intergeneric social behavior, and he was interested. It didn’t really surprise him, though. He said a kit fox is so extroverted and so social that if you deprived it all other animal association it would even groom an elephant.”
“We had another weird combination of friendships,” Mrs. Ready said ruminatively. “We had a black vulture that we raised from an egg. When it was about half grown, I tried to introduce it to the cat, and the cat split. It wasn’t seen again for the rest of the day. But the fox took to the vulture right away, and they would chase each other back and forth, back and forth. The fox always initiated the play, and I’m not sure if the vulture really enjoyed it. It’s hard to tell. A vulture doesn’t have quite as expressive a face as a fox has.”
“A kit fox can relate to absolutely anything,” declared Hanson. “For that reason, one subspecies, the San Joaquin Valley kit fox, is an endangered animal. It thinks the whole world is its friend.”
“Except one animal,” said Doris Ready. “I once brought home a skunk and put it on the floor, and the fox walked right by as if it weren’t there. All the animals ignored that skunk.”
“Sure,” said Hanson. “The skunk wears a flash pattern, black and white, that says ‘Avoid,’ and all other animals do avoid it—except the domestic dog. I guess that sort of caution has been bred out of dogs—which is inconvenient sometimes. Maybe you could cross kit foxes with cocker spaniels and come up with dogs that would avoid skunks. You haven’t seen Mike Fox’s project yet—the crosses he’s made between coyotes and beagles. They’ve produced some strange animals: some pups look like beagles and act like coyotes, and some look like coyotes and act like beagles. Some are beagles with ears that stand up, others are coyotes with drooping ears. He certainly got some bizarre-looking animals. Of course, he isn’t breeding them for looks but to study the genetics of behavior, behavioral anomalies, hybrid characteristics. Do you know that the coyote has been bred in captivity and is sometimes sold in pet shops? It happens, especially around here, which is too bad, as only an exceptional adult coyote can be handled by man. Among these crosses of Michael Fox’s, some are quite beagle-like in their relationships with man, but others develop coyote characteristics as they get older.”
Doris Ready brought the subject back to her kit fox, saying that, although it was indeed ordinarily very affectionate, it had different reactions to different people, and was well aware of the identity of various callers at the house. “She likes the human beings she’s known since she was a little bitty baby, but with new people it’s as if she makes up her mind on sight. She takes an instant dislike to some, who don’t seem to relate very well to animals. Sometimes she nips their ankles. But my mother, who, as a matter of fact, isn’t usually very good with animals, is a great favorite with her. You wonder what it is—how it is that animals happen to like certain people, don’t you?”
“It’s an interesting thing,” Hanson agreed. “What clues do the higher animals use to relate to a human being? As you say, Doris, it isn’t necessarily the person’s attitude. I’m convinced of that. It can’t be a matter of smell, either. It used to be thought that animals might be turned off by the adrenalin pumping in a frightened or worried human being, because it produced an olfactory clue that the animal might pick up and would interpret as a sign of anger or fear, but you sometimes see an animal take a great liking to somebody through a glass door or a window. One thing we know—the animal makes a decision very quickly. You can watch it happening. Doris can see it with her kit fox, and I can with a bobcat I keep as a pet. I can tell immediately what the bobcat thinks of a person—whether he thinks, You’re O.K., I can relate to you, or You’re somebody I really don’t like, and if you come in here I’ll show you how much I don’t like you. It’s absolutely incredible, and I don’t know how it happens.”
I told them about an experience of that sort which I had one day at the Whipsnade zoo, in England, when I was walking there with my husband. Whipsnade has large outdoor paddocks to accommodate the hoofed animals, and as we were walking past one of these, which was full of various placid grazing beasts, we saw one animal running toward us. It was a gnu, and its eyes were fixed on my husband, Charles. It ran straight into the fence, as if it were trying to attack him. It recoiled from the collision, but a moment later it was trying again with all its might to get at Charles. It followed us all the way along, inside the fence, until it could go no farther, showing every sign of enmity. “What do you suppose it was all about?” I asked now. “To my certain knowledge, Charles has never hurt a gnu in his life, and he hardly ever goes to zoos. Perhaps something about him reminded the animal of an old enemy. What do you think?”
“No telling,” said Hanson. “Take cats. Their etiquette is very interesting. If you want to get along with a cat, you have to know several basic things. Most people when they see a cat—that is, if they like cats—want to pet it and cuddle it. They may say something, too, like ‘Hi there!’ Now, that isn’t the way. You want to look at the animal just for a minute, and after your eyes meet, you must turn your eyes away, to show the cat that you aren’t being aggressive—because the aggressive posture of the cat is the locked-eye gaze and various other attitudes, depending on the subspecies, that mean, ‘I am threatening you.’ Cats will transfer this reaction to human beings, and when the stranger says ‘Hi!’ a cat will, according to its nature, back away or make a threatening gesture or merely ignore him. There are certain rigid rules of cat etiquette which you don’t violate if you are really going to get acquainted with it. With some cats in captivity, this response is, in time, eroded away, and they become accepting, but some others never give it up.”
I asked if he thought it was true that cats always kn
ow when they meet people who can’t bear them.
Hanson said he didn’t think so. He had taken such people in to see his bobcat, he said, and nothing happened, though on one occasion the bobcat sensed from the visitor’s recoil how he felt, and gave him a little push. “It was a testing thing,” he said. “He was trying to sense what the man would do. Distressing for the man, of course, but not important. The cat didn’t bite or attack, or anything—just pushed, just tested. In other cases, he simply ignored the people. Yet I’ve seen times when people weren’t quite sure they wanted to meet a bobcat, and he was charming. One would like to know just what is communicated. Often, I know I’m communicating with him but I don’t know what I’m saying or how I’m saying it. There’s no rule I can come up with.” He paused, puffing at his pipe, and thought.
| 1978 |
GUARDIANS
In my sick daughter’s room
The household animals gather.
Our black tom poses lordly on
The sun-warmed windowsill.
A spaniel sleeps by her slippers,
Keeping one weather eye open.
For once, they agree to differ:
Nary a sound, or spit of bother.
Aloof and hieratic as guardians,
They seem wiser than this poor animal
Her father, tiptoeing in and out,
Ferrying water bottle, elixirs, fruit,
His unaccustomed stockinged stealth
Tuned anxiously to a child’s breath.
—JOHN MONTAGUE | 1995 |
CAT THERAPIST
* * *
LOIS METZGER
“Cat therapy,” says Carole Wilbourn, “consists of making owners aware of the strong needs and feelings of their cats and then changing the cats’ environment to accommodate those needs.” In eighteen years in the business, Carole has seen ten thousand cats, with a success rate, according to one veterinarian, of 75 percent. Carole lives in the West Village with a black cat, Ziggy Stardust, and a Siamese, Sunny Blue. Before leaving for a therapy session, Carole always tells her cats, calmly and matter-of-factly, “I’ll be gone for about an hour and I’ll see you later.” Carole does not think that her cats understand the words. “But they pick up feelings of love and security,” she says, “and know I’m not leaving forever.”
People find out about Carole from reading one of her books (Cats Prefer It This Way, The Inner Cat, Cat Talk, Cats on the Couch), or by being referred to her by New York veterinarians, or by seeing her listing in the Yellow Pages under “Cats,” or by running across one of her weekend consultations at Paw’N Claw, a Greenwich Village pet-supply store; she visits a person’s home, sees the person’s cat, and charges from thirty-five to eighty dollars an hour. In recent years, she says, more and more veterinarians have begun to recognize that cats undergo real stress brought on by fear, jealousy, anger, and loss. “Emotional problems can cause medical problems. That’s why you have to treat the total cat.”
Carole is exactly five feet tall, with short, bouncy brown hair and round hazel eyes. Not long ago, we accompanied her on a couple of lower-Manhattan house calls.
BYRON: A beautiful, big nine-year-old tabby with dark-brown and black patches and a white chest, Byron lives in a small one-bedroom apartment in the West Village with three other cats—his brother, Jamie; his mother, Tuna; and his father, Little Guy—and with two people, Joyce and Billy. Byron’s problem is Little Guy—he is terrified of his father. “The parent cats are only nine months older than their children,” Joyce explained. “And Byron is actually bigger and stronger than Little Guy. A couple of times a year, when we’re not home, they really fight. We know because of the fur on the floor—mostly Little Guy’s. Afterward, Little Guy is fine, even pleased, but Byron, our sweetest cat, is devastated.”
Little Guy is a part-Siamese black cat with intense green eyes. “Little Guy stands close to Byron and stares, giving him a piercing look,” Joyce says. “Byron starts to cringe and hiss.”
“It’s hard to get mad at Little Guy,” Billy said. “He’s such a clown—a riot with people.”
Both Billy and Joyce are magazine editors and freelance writers, and Joyce does volunteer work at the Bronx Zoo. “We’ve been together four years, and got married a few months ago,” Joyce said. “Since then, Byron’s been worse, spending almost all his time by himself, hiding from the other cats.”
“Cats are fierce creatures of habit,” Carole said. “Even a subtle change, like new slipcovers on the sofa, can seem to them very dramatic. Wedding preparations can be traumatic.”
Carole was sitting with Joyce and Billy in their living room, surrounded by all the cats except Byron. Joyce, a pretty woman with curly brown hair, was wearing a gray sweatshirt that had a pattern of black pawprints running from hip to shoulder.
“It’s so rare to have a whole family of cats,” Carole said. “Especially the father, who’s usually a stray tom nobody knows.”
“I got Little Guy for Tuna thinking he was another female,” Joyce said. “But he wasn’t, and before I could blink an eye Tuna was pregnant. She gave birth at three in the morning, after waiting for me to get home from a date. First came Jamie, then Byron, who has a big head and was a breech birth. Tuna was in labor for two hours, and I had to help her.”
Carole’s jaw fell. “So often I tell people that problems stem from kitten-hood, and they look at me funny,” she said. “It’s wonderful that you were actually there and could tell us about it.”
With the help of some dry food, Joyce coaxed Byron out from a hiding spot behind the refrigerator. Carole gave him a toy. “I’m not giving toys to the other cats, so that Byron will feel special,” she said. But Little Guy threw Byron a devilish stare, and Byron stayed away from his new toy.
“In the middle of the night, Byron comes downstairs and meows and meows,” Joyce said. “It’s as if he had an imaginary friend.”
Carole went off to one side of the room and made some notes, and then returned. “Imagine a person sitting beside you squirming and cracking his knuckles and humming off-key, for hours on end,” she said. “That’s what it’s like for Little Guy to be near Byron, who’s been anxious since birth. Little Guy moves too close to Byron because he’s hypersensitive to anxiety and wants Byron to relax. It’s one reason cats jump in the laps of people who don’t like cats. Unfortunately, Little Guy’s method is about as useful as slapping a hysterical person. But if Byron loosens up, Little Guy won’t bother him. Tranquillizers can help. So will popcorn, since that’s Byron’s favorite treat. Refer to him as Little Guy’s son—it’s a pleasant connection, and Byron will pick up good feelings. Byron seems sweet and passive, but even across a room I can feel his immense energy. Get that big cat in him out.”
The next day, Joyce called Carole to say that Byron had had a wonderful day—no hissing and no hiding.
“He knew he was getting help,” Carole said to us. “I was so moved. Poor Byron.”
NED: Ned, a ten-year-old black-and-white cat, lives in a large, cozy country-house kind of loft in Tribeca with two English bulldogs, Porky and Beans, and with Alan, an attorney now studying for a doctorate in psychology at the New School, and Sondra, a Pan Am flight attendant, registered nurse, speech therapist, actress, and karate black belt. During the house call, Alan was studying in a room off the living room, and Porky and Beans were sleeping in a gated playpen area. “I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin,” Sondra said. “I have bulldogs because they remind me of the pigs.”
Sondra had called Carole because Ned had been lonely and depressed since the death last summer of their other cat, Buster, and she wanted to know if Ned needed a new cat. Sondra told her story: “During one of those hot, hot weeks last August, Alan and I went out of town, after taking Porky and Beans to a farm in Connecticut and asking our neighbor to feed the cats. One day, he realized that one of the cats hadn’t come around to eat. He found Ned sitting next to the body of Buster. No one knows just what happened to Buster—it may have been the heat. I
went through all of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. I sat in the spot where Buster used to sleep, and spoke to him.”
Sondra, who has thick dark hair and wears it pulled back in a braid, was now sitting on an L-shaped brown tweed sofa. “I got Ned at the A.S.P.C.A.,” she went on. “He was crying at the time, and he kept on crying for four years—even though I got Buster three months after I got him, and they became best friends. They loved each other.”
Ned came into the living room a bit diffidently. He jumped into Sondra’s lap and hid his head under her arm.
Carole talked for a while about a children’s party in St. Vincent’s Hospital, and then she crouched on the floor beside Ned. “That was people chatter,” she said to him. “I talked people chatter so the attention would be off you and you could feel like a cat. Now you’re relaxed, and I’m relaxed, and Sondra’s relaxed.”
Carole gave Ned some catnip and a toy, which he liked, and asked him, “Ned, what do you want? A cat? A kitten? Want to be left alone? Tell me, Ned.”
Then she went off to write her notes.
When she came back, she said, “Ned has always been a sensitive soul. Now he’s suffering from separation anxiety and an abandonment complex, because you were both away when Buster died. Wait a little longer. Don’t get another cat yet. Look on this as Ned’s nurture time. He needs to become the cat he wants to be. Ned, this is your nurture time.”
Ned looked at her and blinked.
| 1984 |
CAT ’N’ MOUSE
Fiction
* * *
STEVEN MILLHAUSER
The cat is chasing the mouse through the kitchen: between the blue chair legs, over the tabletop with its red-and-white checkered tablecloth that is already sliding in great waves, past the sugar bowl falling to the left and the cream jug falling to the right, over the blue chair back, down the chair legs, across the waxed and butter-yellow floor. The cat and the mouse lean backward and try to stop on the slippery wax, which shows their flawless reflections. Sparks shoot from their heels, but it’s much too late: the big door looms. The mouse crashes through, leaving a mouse-shaped hole. The cat crashes through, replacing the mouse-shaped hole with a larger, cat-shaped hole. In the living room, they race over the back of the couch, across the piano keys (delicate mouse tune, crash of cat chords), along the blue rug. The fleeing mouse snatches a glance over his shoulder, and when he looks forward again he sees the floor lamp coming closer and closer. Impossible to stop—at the last moment, he splits in half and rejoins himself on the other side. Behind him the rushing cat fails to split in half and crashes into the lamp: his head and body push the brass pole into the shape of a trombone. For a moment, the cat hangs sideways there, his stiff legs shaking like the clapper of a bell. Then he pulls free and rushes after the mouse, who turns and darts into a mousehole in the baseboard. The cat crashes into the wall and folds up like an accordion. Slowly, he unfolds, emitting accordion music. He lies on the floor with his chin on his upraised paw, one eyebrow lifted high in disgust, the claws of his other forepaw tapping the floorboards. A small piece of plaster drops on his head. He raises an outraged eye. A framed painting falls heavily on his head, which plunges out of sight between his shoulders. The painting shows a green tree with bright-red apples. The cat’s head struggles to rise, then pops up with the sound of a yanked cork, lifting the picture. Apples fall from the tree and land with a thump on the grass. The cat shudders, winces. A final apple falls. Slowly it rolls toward the frame, drops over the edge, and lands on the cat’s head. In the cat’s eyes, cash registers ring up “No Sale.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 41
